Picking up Gravel

With a lot of prolific writer Warren Ellis' comic material, I've often hoped for it to be made into movies, but... it's usually just too f*cked up for anyone to take a chance.

Fortunately Legendary Pictures has some stones, as well as GRAVEL. The production company (300, THE DARK KNIGHT) has grabbed Ellis' Avatar series about the title character, a British S.A.S. commando and "combat magician" who uses ancient sorcery as a weapon to handle "deniable operations" involving various supernatural threats.

Ellis himself will tap out the first draft and serve as exec producer on the project. The William Gravel character, first appearing in 1999, has been in several miniseries under the Strange Kiss and Strange Killings titles before getting his own current ongoing book.

Ellis seems to be finally getting his due all over the place in Hollywood -- he's been writing a Knights of the Round Table script, his sci-fi comic OCEAN is being adapted, his retired-spy miniseries RED is in the pipe with Bruce Willis and Morgan Freeman, and he's poking around in animation -- he wrote the recent G.I. JOE: RESOLUTE webseries and the stories for the upcoming Marvel Anime films.